Summer school brings students from across Europe to look at developing healthy apps

An international project developing new software applications to help people live independent lives has welcomed students from across Europe to Wales.

The eHealth Summer School – held at Wrexham Glyndŵr University - is a collaboration between universities in Spain, France, Germany, Cyprus – and Wales. The school brought students from several disciplines together to work on developing applications which were designed to help people with a variety of health conditions live independently for longer.

Running over two weeks, the first week saw a series of lectures, demonstrations and hands-on product development in Glyndŵr’s computer labs – with students designing and developing prototype products aimed at supporting users with a wide range of conditions which could threaten their independence.

Wrexham Glyndŵr University Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, Richard Picking, said: “The visitors to the eHealth Eurocampus summer school were a mixture of IT, health and medical students from across Europe.

“The aim of the fortnight was to try to develop e-health as a wider course, and to look at how technology can help people live independent lives – helping people to manage or live with conditions which can be difficult to face alone, and do so in their own homes.

“We also worked collaboratively with departments such as Theatre, Health and Occupational Therapy to build develop the programme for the week.

“The school is part of a wider, three-year project funded under the Erasmus+ scheme – and that wider project is developing models for use by Masters students to develop e-health programmes. I’d like to thank everyone who took part – the school was a great success.”

Drama students from Wrexham Glyndŵr University helped out with the course by role-playing potential service users.

Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Television and Performance, Elen Mai Nefydd said: “I’m delighted that our students have been given this opportunity to perform at the Summer School, so that they can apply their role play skills further.

“The applied theatre aspect of the degree is going from strength to strength and this means that the theatre degree can now start collaborating with subject areas such as Social Care and Computing.”